


Two Better Men

by proxydialogue



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gore, Language, M/M, Slash, agnst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-14
Updated: 2012-10-14
Packaged: 2017-11-16 06:41:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/proxydialogue/pseuds/proxydialogue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock was an addict and John had a temper, they were two men who required a lot of forgiving. But those are just the facts. They were also like storybook characters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Better Men

**Author's Note:**

> Archived from LJ. Orig pub: 12/17/2011

 

The great detective, Sherlock Holmes, sat with his back to the sun on a bench outside of the Royal Brompton Hospital and watched his long shadow grow longer. He was a cold figure—like marble or alabaster—a cold young man with a cold expression sitting in the warmth of the sunny afternoon. There was a strap of gauze taped along the left side of his face, just behind his eye and running over his cheekbone. It was clean and irritating; he picked at the tape with his long fingers. A white cast around his right wrist puffed out the sleeve of his coat and a spectacular bruise had bloomed underneath his collar along the back of his neck. His lip had been split and he chewed at it absently with his front teeth.  
   
There was no one on the bench beside him. But he sat on the far left side, as if he was expecting someone.  
   
He wasn’t.  
   
The great detective, Sherlock Holmes, sat alone.

xxx

The good doctor, John Watson, lay on the most uncomfortable bed designed by God or man with his face turned into the puddle of sunlight that streamed in his window. There was a heart monitor beeping softly beside him. When he could find the energy to swim up into consciousness for a few moments the sound drove him crazy. The scrapes on his face had been cleaned and were starting to scab over. His others wounds were hidden by the blankets, but he could feel the constriction of the bandages around his ribs, the sutures in his thigh. And, even drugged up as he was, he could feel the tension in his abdomen that meant he would be pissing blood for at least a week.  
   
There was no one in the room with him. Though a chair had been provided and sat dutifully at his bedside.  
   
John kept one hand, palm up, on top of the blankets, as if he was expecting someone to come sit in the chair and hold it for him.     
   
He wasn’t.  
   
The good doctor, John Waston, fell back to sleep alone.

   
xxx

   
There must be something we can say about the natural way of friends. What’s more there must be something we can say about John Watson and Sherlock Holmes. One had a great mind and the other had a great heart. But John possessed a temper, you know. The ordeal of recovering from a bullet wound and the sudden emersion into Sherlock’s world of crime kept him tepid for a time. But John had been to war, and he was still at war, and sometimes it showed. Mrs. Hudson replaced many a tea cup, a window, a picture frame in her time as the landlady of 221b Baker Street.  
   
And Sherlock wasn’t exactly the sympathetic type, and he was an addict besides. He couldn’t stand the pace of ordinary life and when the criminal classes of London were slacking John would come back from the surgery, three days out of four, and find the syringe or the empty prescription painkiller bottles on the living room coffee table; Sherlock sprawled on the couch, languid and gray.  
   
Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were two men who required a lot of forgiving. No two more so than by each other.  
   
But those are just the facts.  
   
They were also like storybook characters. Always dashing about with one foot in some dangerous adventure and the other in the everyday tedium of domestic London. Being martyrs, heroes, rogues. On one or two occasions they were criminals too, murders, antiheroes. It depends on who you talk to.  
   
The reason they got away with it, with being impossible figures in a world that was so obsessed with reality, was because the storybook characters were all that people ever saw. So they were easy to believe in, when you needed it, and easy to overlook when you didn’t.  
   
Nobody ever saw them just being men. John pulling his cotton underwear out of the crack of his ass after Sherlock shrunk the laundry. Sherlock being stuck, miserable and infuriated, on the pot for an hour and a half after eating badly cooked tilapia while he held a plastic basin in his lap because it was coming out both ends. They were just as morbid and messy as everyone is.  
   
And you know what else? They were in love. They were two blokes who spent half the time (when they weren’t chasing down evil) fucking like rabbits and the other half arguing over who was used up the last roll of toilet paper.  And some people really did think Sherlock was a higher functioning sociopath, but the people who knew him at all knew better. And John really was a war hero, but he was also a son of a bitch when he’d been drinking and he told same three terrible knock-knock jokes over and over again.  
   
But the natural way of friends isn’t to be there for one through the best and the worst of times. In the stories it is, but in real life it’s about forgiving them when they don’t show up after all and about letting them cry on your shoulder even though you think they’re being a ninny-shit.  
   
The great detective sat alone outside the hospital, not because he was a higher functioning sociopath, or because he was working out his next move against Moriarty, but because he didn’t want to go upstairs. Because he was exhausted, and he knew John was going to force him into a conversation about his feelings, and he fucking  _hated_  talking about his feelings and he hated it when John presumed to know  _what_  he was feeling even when John was right. He was outside because if he went inside they were going to have a fight.  
   
The good doctor fell asleep alone because he knew Sherlock well enough by now to know when he was being avoided. He was pissed that Sherlock hadn’t come to visit him yet, but he was more pissed that Sherlock had told him to shut the fuck up when John had tried to say “I love you,” in the ambulance. And he was starting to think that maybe he shouldn’t have tried to say it at all because it probably wasn’t even true.  
   
But you see how those things are not the things you want to know?  
   
People want to know that John and Sherlock were two halves of the same whole. They want to know that they were tragic and heroic and forever and all those other things that no one sane actually believes at the end of a shit day in the office; after working through a stack of paper work a mile high and forgetting their gloves on the coldest day of the year while rushing out the door to answer the call for a fatal hit-and-run where the blood was smeared all over the pavement and the old lady’s head was like a squashed pumpkin with white hair. People don’t want to know that John and Sherlock were just men.  
   
And people really don’t want to know that they were human. And that no one human could have survived a blast like that from twenty feet away, however much of a genius or a war hero they were. No one human could have made it into the water in time.  
   
No. It’s better that people know the storybook characters.  
   
The great detective and the good doctor. When I went to visit them in the hospital the sun had gone down and Sherlock was slumped at John’s bedside like an elongated sack of exhausted potatoes, his fingers tangled with John’s. And John was trying, unsuccessfully, to scratch his nose with his other hand which was mittened in gauze. He gave me a tired smile when I knocked on the door and asked me how the investigation was going.  
   
“Slow,” I admitted. “No sign of Moriarty.”  
   
Sherlock opened his gray eyes and looked at me without lifting his head from the bed.  
   
“He can’t hide forever,” he mumbled. And as I turned to shut the door so we could have some privacy I saw him press a kiss to John’s palm. John’s smile stretched and he managed to scratch his nose on his sleeve. Out of the corner of my eye the old hospital lights made them look faded and colorless—like ghosts.  
   
On my life, I never knew two better men.  
   
On my life.


End file.
